St Helens, England, 1944
I can't tell you how much of a rush that opening caption from The Keeper gave me. You see, it's not often that a film is set in my hometown. Not just my hometown, but on the very streets immediately beyond my front doorstep and within my local pub. And OK, they didn't film it here, they filmed it in rural Northern Ireland, which doesn't really look anything like here but yeah, let me have my moment.
Bert Trautmann is a legend here in St Helens. Arriving in the town as a German POW, his prowess as a goalkeeper soon caught the attention of St Helens AFC's manager Jack Friar, whilst his good looks captured the heart of Friar's daughter Margaret. Of course, being a former soldier in the Wehrmacht (and one awarded the Iron Cross to boot), Trautmann's reception in the town was initially a hostile one in the immediate aftermath of the war, and this struggle to be accepted was further magnified when he signed for Manchester City, one of the biggest clubs in England, in 1949. But Trautmann's gentlemanly conduct, his desire to move on and make the best of things, and his outstanding performances on the pitch soon won even his fiercest critics over. As a player with Man City, he will forever be remembered as 'the man who played on' when, during the 1956 FA Cup Final, he broke his neck but refused to leave the pitch until victory was secured.
It is very weird watching a film set in your hometown though, seeing locations on screen purporting to be places you know, and seeing household familiar actors portray people whose children, grandchildren and relations you also actually know to talk to. As I say, the location filming doesn't really look much like what St Helens looked like during this period (nowhere near industrial looking enough really) and the exterior location of the Junction Inn (my nearest pub) is particularly unrecognisable, I mean it's called the Junction because it's directly opposite the train station so to not factor that in was a bit remiss, but they've clearly worked from photos of the now demolished 'town ground', as us St Heleners affectionately called the team's ground, as the stands as depicted brought back memories. I often have an issue about accents and getting them right (and wrong) in films and it's fair to say that no one on the screen here really convinced me as coming from St Helens, with the possible exception of Barbara Young as Grandma Sarah. John Henshaw, who plays Jack Friar, is performing in his usual Manchester Ancoats accents, whilst Freya Mavor (playing Margaret) and the rest of the cast are doing a generic northern accent that often sounded more Yorkshire to my ears than Lancastrian. To be fair, St Helens is a strange accent these days, with no two people ever really sounding the same; some sound proper Lancastrian, whilst others sound scouse, but the former was definitely the way to go for the actors here. Did any of this detract from me appreciation of the film? No, not really. I'm just glad that they got some good details in - such as the team singing 'When the Saints Go Marching In', a St Helens anthem used for both football and rugby league - and have bothered to tell the story in the first place. It's been a long time coming; the actor Warren Clarke, a staunch Man City fan*, had long harboured a desire to make a film of Trautmann's extraordinary life and it's a shame that he didn't live to see this.
I can't fault the performances either; David Kross is very good and believable as Trautmann, both on and off the pitch, and he possesses good chemistry with Mavor, an actress who is fast becoming a crush for me. John Henshaw is always good value, that goes without saying, but I did feel that the likes of Gary Lewis, Dervla Kirwan, Dave Johns and Julian Sands were a little wasted in their supporting roles. As a film, I wouldn't say The Keeper did anything spectacular and may hold little interest for anyone outside of the north west or those who do not follow football, but it was a very enjoyable watch that didn't seek to simply gloss over Trautmann's war record and the discomfort he felt about having to perform such a duty. I may be reading a little too much into it here, and I have to be a little careful about what I say, but in some respects The Keeper feels a little timely now as a Brexit movie. St Helens, to my eternal disappointment, was a leave voting town (as indeed were so many towns scarcely troubled by immigration and who had previously benefitted greatly from EU funding) so there's something of a contemporary resonance in seeing characters purporting to be from here (and later from Manchester) telling a German immigrant to go home and treating him with vitriol. Now obviously with the war, these people had a much greater and more genuine reason for hating a foreign migrant than any xenophobe has towards a wholly innocent one in today's climate, but I felt that the parallel was still there nonetheless and that the harmonious message of forgive and forget that the film has is one that is needed now more than ever. Then again, with the news as it is, maybe everything I view feels like it's shot through with Brexit nowadays.
*One other famous Man City fan also makes a contribution to the movie; Noel Gallagher's song, 'The Dying of the Light', plays over the closing credits.
If Ken Loach remade the epic John Ford western The Searchers, it would probably look rather like this...
Catch Me Daddy is is a bleak, visceral cinematic feature debut from Daniel Wolfe, a former music video director (who has also co-written the script his brother Matthew) concerning the murderous phenomenon of the 'honour killing' in British Pakistani communities. Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed - an incredible performance) and Aaron (Conor McCarron) live together in a squalid caravan on the edge of the unforgiving Yorkshire Moors. They are ostensibly in love, but Laila's family - believing she has brought shame upon them - refuse to tolerate their relationship, and have hired a posse of hardened bounty hunters — Tony and Barry, a strictly mercenary white duo (Gary Lewis and Barry Nunney) and a South Asian four man crew led by Junaid (Anwar Hussain) and accompanied by Laila's brother Zaheer (Ali Ahmad) — to forcibly split them apart and return her back to them.
Naturally given the weight of the issue the film deals with, its tone is both harrowing and pessimistic. Wolfe's eye and Robbie Ryan's fantastic cinematography capture the ugly harsh savagery of life in its many forms; drugs feature in various forms, not least of all Gary Lewis' coke snorting, but there's also a preoccupation with pills too. There's a moment early on where Aaron watches a falcon decimate its live prey which sees the camera linger on the gore and is a potent metaphor for the hunter and their prey to come - indeed the camera often strays around bloodletting, not in an exploitative way, but in a strangely sensitive, lyrical manner, almost as the calm before the storm. It's certainly a very visually striking movie, boasting imagery that will remain with you for some time after viewing.
The film boldly foregoes any sense of a great love affair between Laila and Aaron. They are living in a reasonably contented manner, but still with a degree of tension borne of constantly looking over one's shoulder. There is some sweet talk of childhood experiences and crazed dancing to Patti Smith's Horses, but the connection is never really felt, making their relationship seem all the more futile when considered against the danger they face. Overall you get the feeling that these are just two disenfranchised kids who have simply ended up together as a form of escapism of one kind or another. The irony is however that it appears Laila may have swapped one controlling male in her life for another as she earns pin money working in a dreary local salon whilst Aaron refuses to budge from the caravan or entertain the notion of the menial work on offer in the town.
The action is split between them and their hunters; Junaid is definitely the alpha male here, a cold and impassive figure who Wolfe introduces with an ironic gentility, having a 3D picture taken of him and his baby daughter in a shopping centre. Once the action gets under way, we realise we've been sold a dummy here and its chilling to reflect on the suggestion Wolfe implicitly made with just such an introduction - that some time in the future Junaid might be unable to come to terms with his grown-up daughter's Western liberal nature, the expression of her sexuality or her overall maturity just like Laila's father right now in the present. The Asian bounty hunters have an uneasy alliance with Tony and Barry, the white men they have contacted to help through their work on the club doors. Barry Nunney's Barry is a truly frightening, loutish monster, whilst Tony, played by Gary Lewis, is clearly a troubled older soul, struggling with an obvious drug addiction and lacking the necessary aggression or focus for the task ahead. He also appears to have family issues of his own and the estranged parent and child relationship is a theme that runs throughout the film in various guises.
This is a bleakly beautiful, scary, exciting and authentically gritty piece of social realism, but it is perhaps not for the faint hearted - some scenes are really difficult to watch because of the high emotion and unflinching spectacle on display. The film's final moments may divide opinion but there's no denying that this is a blistering debut from Wolfe who, on this form, could easily take his place alongside the likes of Clio Barnard, Andrea Arnold and Shane Meadows as part of this generation's cinematic social realists.
I think largely because I was brought up on Hammer horror, I've always been predisposed to low budget horror movies made here in the UK. Recent years have seen a glut of them, including the revival of Hammer studios. Some have been fairly dreadful and some have been pretty good, a lot of them have been average and yet I still find I like these a little more than I perhaps ought to.
When The Lights Went Out (made in 2012 and receiving its premiere on Sky Movies a couple of weeks back - I don't think it troubled the cinemas) is loosely based on a real poltergeist haunting known as 'The Black Monk of Pontefract', said to have occurred in the home of the Pritchard family at 30 East Drive Chequerfield Estate in Pontefract, West Yorkshire in 1974. There, supernatural disturbances by a poltergeist given the nickname 'Fred' terrorised the family including throwing objects around the room, dropping room temperature and, in one particularly distressing circumstance, dragging the daughter Diane upstairs by her neck. In 1981, Colin Wilson wrote a book about the haunting which gained notoriety in paranormal circles and it is this that one imagines the film is largely based upon.
Writer and Director Pat Holden nicely evokes the 1974 setting with a strong design recreation of the hairstyles, fashions and gaudy wallpaper. Plus its not every day you see a horror film that features extensive use of the children's game Buckaroo! Equally he captures the dry humour of the north ensuring this is a horror film with laughs; I especially liked the exchange between daughter Sally and her outcast friend who gets picked on for smelling of urine. "Are you incontinent?" "I used to have to wear a nappy" "So did I" "Not when you were 10!" and the use of "Soft arse" as an insult.
However, he relies a little too heavily on the basic modern horror tropes of sudden jumps which makes for a predictable and somewhat cheesy affair and, though its clearly for plot expediency sake, I did find the quick acceptance of the ghost from the family a little too pat. Still, there's a strong cast on display including Kate Ashfield and Steven Waddington as the parents, renamed the Maynards here, and a promising debut from Tasha Connor as their troubled daughter Sally. Playing friends of the family are the excellent Craig Parkinson and Andrea Lowe and there's also a trio of actors who have previously appeared in Ken Loach movies, Tony Pitts (Looks and Smiles) Gary Lewis (from many of Loach's Scottish films) and Martin Compston (Sweet Sixteen) though it's fair to say that Compston's 70s helmet of hair and bum fluff is perhaps the scariest thing you'll see in the whole movie!
Though flawed in places this is still a mildly successful and entertaining way to pass 80 or so minutes.
